In an earlier lesson, you learned about Google page rank. Now that you know exactly what it is, you’d probably like to boost your page rank. After all, your site has a low page rank and you find that to be unacceptable, so you want to do something to increase it. Many people have begun to market tools that you can use to increase the page rank. The vast majority of these tools are useless, however, and really do not benefit you at all.

What will increase Google page rank is applying some of the techniques listed below to your site. It’s a guaranteed way of boosting page rank and is completely free. Why spend the money to increase page rank when we’ll tell you how to do it for free?

Increasing Page Rank

As we said, there are several techniques to increase a web site’s Google page rank. Even if you only follow one of the techniques below, you can expect to see a positive difference in your site’s page rank.

Technique #1: Content

Despite the fact that SEO experts constantly talk about the importance of content, most web masters ignore their advice to make sure their sites have quality content. It’s really crazy, particularly when you consider the fact that Google looks at content when determining page rank. Thus, one of the greatest techniques toward improving page rank is to simply make sure your site has quality content. This content should ALWAYS be relevant to the topic of the site. The content should not be too long (greater than 2500 words a page) or too short, should be informative and should include the right amount of keywords (a keyword density of 2-5%). If your content has all of this, you should be in very good condition to increase your page rank.

Technique #2: Back links

The major determining factor in Google’s page rank is back links. These are incoming links from one site to your site. What these links tell Google is that your site must have good content on it, or else other sites would not be linking to it. Now you might think that all that matters is the links, right? Not exactly. Google has gotten very smart and accurate with page rank, and so they can tell bad links (i.e. Links from link farms, irrelevant sites etc.) from the good links (links in articles, links from relevant sites etc.). The most effective technique in increasing page rank is to gather good back links. The next two techniques on our list deal with this.

Technique #3: Forums and Blogs

Google is known for quickly indexing forums and blogs. Literally the fastest way to gain a good back link is to simply post a link to your site on a forum or a blog. Most forums consider outright linking to be spam, so you’ll have to make sure you do this in the right way. Try joining forums relevant to your site’s topic and put a link to your site in your signature, if it’s allowed. Also, put a link to your site in your profile. Then post 1-10 times. Your posts should contribute something to the forum so that they are not edited or, worse, removed.

As for using blogs to gain more links, you can try to create a blog of your own and casually put a link to your site on it. You can also try commenting on other relevant blogs and including a link to your site in these comments. Once again, you need to be cautious in how you do this you don’t want to make comments that are outright promoting your site.

Technique #4: Articles

An increasingly more popular way of gaining a better Google page rank is to write articles. These articles are based off of your site. For instance, if you run a photography site, you may write an article on digital photography. At the end of the article, you might include something like “for more on digital photography, visit insert site.com”. Article back links are very effective because they are considered credible by Google. One thing to remember is to not mention your site too many times; one or two mentions per article is fine. You can submit your articles to AssociatedContent.com and Ezines or you can use article submission services or Article Submitter software.

Lesson 9 Wrap-Up

You don’t have to spend money to increase page rank. All you need to do is just practice some of the techniques we’ve outlined here and you’ll be well on your way to a better Google page rank.